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Failure as Friend.

Just as the lotus rises out of mud, so too are our failures the very fertilizer for our realized beauty.

That's a nice thought. But it's more than another cute, pinnable aphorism. It's a mandate for your life, and mine. We all fail.

Nearly four years ago, I put my (successful) business out of business. And I spent the next four years rebuilding. I lost just about everything—and the fact that my wound was largely self-inflicted did not make those lean, stressful times any less lean or stressful. Then, as elephant was reborn from magazine into a moderately successful web site, I had (by far) the worst relationship of my life. I’ve spent most of the ensuing 1.5 years alone, lonely, beaten, stressed, and on some level, depressed.

But through it all I’ve followed a thread: my path is my joy. My vocation is my avocation, as Robert Frost said (I think). My criteria for how I spend my short life on this sweet, terrible planet is this:

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...to our new Daily Wake Up Call: one beautiful photo or quote. Put a little gap in the inbox of your mind. Less hype, more ahhhh. Our partners at Namaste plant a tree with every email sent. Seriously!